Sr. Staff Data Architect

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver.

Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes.

The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases.

The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states.

You will:

• Define and drive the global architectural roadmap for Waymo's Data Lake, governing the transition from ad-hoc processing to a production-grade, highly scalable analytical ecosystem.
• Serve as the ultimate Tech Lead (TL) over cross-domain data pipelines, governing dependencies and maintaining platform consistency across both centralized infrastructure and embedded product domains.
• Champion and enforce linear DAG architectures and modern Lakehouse/Medallion standards to untangle highly coupled, opaque "spaghetti" lineage.
• Chair centralized Data Design Review forums, establishing unified standards for modularized code, testing suite enforcement, DAG dependency registration, and environmentalization.
• Architect common, self-service frameworks and "Managed Pipeline Services" (like hardened wrappers and templates) for downstream consumption by Data Engineers and Product Data Scientists.
• Oversee core integration strategies for Data Governance, ensuring privacy (GDPR), access Control (IAM/RBAC), and pipeline compliance are deeply baked into core architecture. You have:
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
• 12+ years of experience leading the design, implementation, and operations of multi-Petabyte Data Lake/Data Warehouse solutions in high-growth companies.
• Proven track record of being the Lead Architect driving significant data governance and data platform maturity transitions (e.g., ad-hoc ➔ standardized).
• Deep experience driving a data infrastructure org through rapid growing phrase, effectively balancing speed for analysts with central governance guardrails.
• Expert-level technical depth in distributed batch/streaming frameworks (e.g., C++, Flume, Apache Spark, Flink).